'Effective Blogging for SEO' Guide
Posted by admin on April, 26th 2010Blogging Guide – Real Web SEO
Blogging effectively and consistently has many advantages for SEO:
- Each blog post is a new page on your site
- Your site is alive with constant blogs (fresh content is great for search engines)
- You’ll gain more traffic through specific searches (example: you’ll never rank for “pink, polka-dot umbrellas” unless you have the words “pink”, “polka-dot” and “umbrellas” on your site somewhere!)
- People actually read blogs; if the posts are interesting then they may subscribe to your RSS feed to see what you blog about next or they could link to your blog from their site/blog/facebook/twitter etc.
Also you build up your site up as an asset; Yahoo started out as two guy’s friendly guide to the world wide web and now look! If you just paid for traffic with Google Adwords then as soon as you stop paying you lose all business.
How to blog effectively
Post Title
Each blog post should be centred around one main theme. The title of the post is of the highest important and it should mention the main keyword you want to rank for in Google. Say for example I wanted people to visit my site through the keyword “rainbow umbrella” a good title would be “Rainbow umbrellas – a colourful way to splash around in the rain”. Don’t go crazy through and create a blog post around every product you have, think of related subjects to your product/service for example “12 things to do on a rainy day” if you’re selling umbrellas for instance.
Post Image
Having an image on each blog post will be an advantage for three reasons:
- It makes the blog look more interesting (not just a mass of text)
- You can get extra traffic through image results on search engines
- You can add tags to the image describing what it is, if this corresponds to the post’s theme then it gives the post a boost in SEO
If you haven’t got any images then you can re-use old ones, photoshop old ones to make them look different or even buy them from places such as istockphoto.com (around £1 for a small professional one).
Rename the image to the post’s main keyword (which should be in the post’s title) with dashes in-between words, for example “wooden-umbrella-stand.jpg”. If the image is straight off a digital camera then use some photo editing software to shrink it to around 250 pixels wide; having full definition images on your blog will really slow it down!
Insert the image into the post using the insert/upload function in WordPress:
Change these settings once up select the file and upload it:
Change these settings to give the image a margin for the text spacing (you need to click on the image to get the image options tab to appear):
Give the image vertical and horizontal space in the advanced settings:
Post Content
Now it’s time to write some content; you need to have over 200 words in your post and keep the writing focused on the subject matter. Make sure to write naturally, people like to read blogs how they would be spoken to so don’t worry too much about grammar or sentence structure just write it as you’d say it. If you keep repeating the same keyword then this can actually harm your post. Try and vary the words in your blog and don’t worry how many times you use basic words such as “and”, “the”, “a” etc. as these don’t count for keyword spam.
A great tip is to use synonyms of your keywords so you get your whole blog focused around one subject (the subject you want to rank for!). For example if one of my target keywords was “waterproof” then I’ll also be mentioning the words “impermeable”, “impervious”, “rainproof”, “sealed”, “tight” and “watertight” a lot as they are related words. If you can’t think of any then crack open a Thesaurus or goto Thesaurus.com:
Highlight your main keyword in the main body text at least one by making it bold. Simply highlight the text you want to make bold and press the large “B” button in the text editor. You can use bold, underlines, bullet points and sub headings to make your post more interesting and give it a more readable structure.
Linking to other related posts on your blog is great for SEO as it allows readers to quickly jump to similar topics. To create a link you firstly highlight text within your blog post and then click on the chain link icon:
SEO Tags
After writing the blog post you need to sort out it’s ‘meta’ data which significantly helps in search engine optimisation. These are just tags and descriptions which tell users and search engines what the blog post is all about.
Firstly you need to pick a category for the post which best describes the subject. Hopefully you’ve already set up category’s already that align with your main keywords. These category titles appear in the URL of your site so they need one or two keywords in separated by hyphens.
Next you should add 3 or 4 tags that mention the main keywords for the post. These should be separated by commas for example: “umbrellas, waterproof, rain”.
The last task is to go down to the bottom of the page and give your post’s page a meta title. Simply repeat your post’s title in the meta title situated in the “All in one SEO pack” and Google will do the rest.
Publishing Your Post
When publishing your post you can preview how it will look, save it as a draft that will not be published quite yet or you can even tell WordPress to publish it at a later date.
Instead of posting everyday you could build up two or more posts and automatically publish them day-by-day in the future. It’s good to have new blog posts consistently on your site and you’ll notice ever increased traffic when you do so.
Good luck!
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